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Illinois Public Media

Millikin University Freezes Tuition for Second Straight Year

February 28, 2013

For the second year in a row, tuition and housing rates at Millikin University are not going up.

The small private school in Decatur announced Thursday that full-time undergraduate tuition for the academic year starting in the fall would stay at $27,852 a year --- the same as this year and the year before.

Tuition for Millikin’s PACE evening undergraduate program will stay at $17 per credit hour. Meanwhile, the average annual housing rate will stay at $5,000.

Millikin interim president Rich Dunsworth said the school’s decision to hold the line on tuition and housing costs is in line with one of the goals of their founder, businessman James Millikin, that education be accessible.

“We don’t know that we’ll always be able to freeze or hold tuition, or even bring it down,” said Dunsworth. “But it’s our commitment to never put that on auto-pilot, where every year, tuition goes up x percentage points, just because that’s what’s expected. We don’t want to do that.”

Dunsworth said Millikin’s tuition rates fall into the middle range for private colleges and universities, but he added that few of their students pay full price. Besides government financial assistant for around 40 percent of their students, 99 percent receive some level of scholarship endowment from private donors.

“Almost 100 percent of our students are entitled to some degree of merit-based aid,” said Dunsworth. “We look at what they’ve done in their high school; what they’ve done in their communities in terms of servicel the types of leadership things that they’ve done..”

Dunsworth said they cannot make any promises, but are committed to holding the line on costs at Millikin for as long as possible. Before that policy was set, the school had been raising tuition and housing rates an average of 4 percent a year.

Dunworth said the university’s small enrollment - about 2,300 full-time students - makes it easier for them to control costs.